Speaker 1: Hey, Salvador Rigman here. Welcome back to the Crowdfunding Demonstified YouTube channel, and on this channel, we talk about how to raise money using crowdfunding, how to use money, raise money using GoFundMe for charity, for non-profit, for Kickstarter, Indiegogo, more business companies, etc. And in today's video, I'm going to customize this for the charities out there that want to use GoFundMe to raise money, to fund their endeavors, to help them spread their message, to help them involve volunteers, like all that kind of stuff. That's what I really want to cover in today's video. So I have other videos out there on how to use GoFundMe, how it works, some of the ideas behind the functionality, ways you can promote your campaign, etc. So this video, I'm going to try and make a little bit more comprehensive and a little bit more focused on the charities in the audience. And by a charity, I mean you are a non-profit organization. You're a 501c3 non-profit. You have that accreditation status, and you're trying to use GoFundMe to raise money for a project of some kind, for a cause, or for some kind of an endeavor that's related to your core mission behind your non-profit. So how do you use GoFundMe in this way? Well, first of all, as you know, GoFundMe is a form of crowdfunding. So you can obviously use this to get money, to make an ask. People don't just hand you money. That very rarely happens to me in life. I think it's only happened a couple of times where a member of my audience is like, just sent me $10 via PayPal, or a friend or a family member give me a gift for my birthday or for holidays, that kind of stuff. People rarely give money to a stranger, and specifically to a charity nowadays, because there's so much skepticism. There's all these statistics out there that if you give $100 to a charity, really only $10 are going to actually go and help the people in need. In order to get money on GoFundMe, you have to create an ask, and an ask is just very simple. It's like a fancy wording for creating the story, the campaign page, the video or the image, which explains what it is you're trying to do. Where is the money going? Why is this going to make an impact? Then you have the campaign text, the videos and images that sort of support that video and further elaborate on the story. Finally, you have your fundraising meter. This is one of the things that separates crowdfunding from a lot of other types of fundraisers and charities out there, is that by seeing that big online fundraising meter, people get excited. You can see the momentum. They come to a page and see it's already raised this amount of money. It feels like there's almost more credibility to the charity or the non-profit, because it can visibly see, look, already $5,000 has been pledged to this cause. It's going to be worth my time to actually watch that video, to learn a little bit more about what they're trying to do. Of course, you can also see all the people who are supporting the campaign and that kind of thing. Crowdfunding is actually, I think, it's a little bit special in that way, because you're putting that credibility right in people's face. In that way, they're more likely to check out what it is you're trying to do. I just want to write a few of these down here, just so that if you're taking notes along the way, you can make it a little bit easier. Credibility. I think that of all of the things about crowdfunding, one of the most important or the most critical is this whole credibility aspect, because yes, you can use crowdfunding to raise money online, but what is actually, I think, more effective than just having a successful raise and having that money, is other people seeing that you were able to pull that off, that you actually rallied $100,000 worth of funding for your nonprofit, and you did it online in small micro donations. That is a show of commitment. There are different political fundraisers out there, and I'm not going to name any names, but when you see that people are giving money in the $25 amount, $50 amount, $10 amount, and that adds up to $50,000 worth of funding, you say, wow, those people are really committed, and it adds to the story behind your nonprofit. That's a very powerful message to maybe if you're trying to reach out to corporate sponsors at some point in time, corporate givers, or you're trying to just embolden the other people that have already given money, maybe, or that regularly give money through an annual giving fundraiser that you have. If you're trying to get people excited about what you're doing, and people learn, when you pull off a successful campaign, that just shows that other people are so invested that they're willing to give their hard-earned money. The credibility behind a fundraising meter, behind the actual amount that you've raised, the media attention that can come with doing a public crowdfunding campaign that other people are starting to write about you, maybe they're sharing your campaign on their Facebook feed or on their Instagram, et cetera, that credibility is a big part of crowdfunding. In addition, once you finally do successfully raise money, you have a list of all of these donors that you can add to your donor database, these donors who have interacted with you before, and if they have a good experience, they're willing to support another online fundraising campaign that you can do. This is the reason why with Kickstarter, we see someone who has done 10 different Kickstarter campaigns for board games. They do it over and over and over again because they built a relationship with their audience. This is a way for you to gain credibility, build relationships, and kind of make a splash for your organization. It's going to be way more effective than you trying to do just some big marketing campaign, or trying to spend a bunch of money on Facebook ads, or trying to have some kind of publicity stunt. None of that is really going to work as well as doing something successfully like a raise like this. The other thing that I just really want to quickly say before we get into some of the actual practical tips and strategy they have for you is that if you are a nonprofit organization, chances are you might not be terribly tech savvy, or you might not have the resources to build a very professional website. The cool thing about GoFundMe is that they give you the actual campaign page. All you have to do is upload the media assets to that, and they're relatively easy to get. So if you've been struggling before with, you know, I want to do like a big online fundraiser type of campaign, but we just don't have the resources or the ability to pull that off, you could use this as kind of like a hub for all of that activity, and in that way direct people to the campaign page. You don't have to direct them to your website or anything like that, and it kind of means that you don't need a website in order to do a crowdfunding campaign. Instead, you can just actually rely on the campaign page. But now that we've covered the why and kind of why that can help you stand out, how it can get you money and credibility, and how it makes things a lot simpler, let's talk about the actual tips that go into running one of these campaigns and some of the hacks that I've discovered to help you do it much more quickly. So while I'm erasing this here, I also have a book out there called Crowdfunding Personal Expenses and another book called Nonprofit Crowdfunding Explained. So if you go on Amazon, you type in Nonprofit Crowdfunding Explained, Nonprofit Crowdfunding Explained, or you put that into Audible, you can actually listen to my book. I read the book myself and I do it with my pizazz and my excitement, or you can get a paperback version of Nonprofit Crowdfunding Explained. It's a really good book and a very good intro. A lot of the bedrock material that I've discovered in terms of how to get traffic and attention to one of these projects, and not only with GoFundMe, but it also highlights some of the other websites out there that you can use to raise money for your charity or to raise money for charitable events and those types of things. So I recommend that. But getting into this, the number one thing that I've seen that makes the biggest difference, I'm talking the biggest leverage point of having a successful campaign or not having a successful campaign, is having a team. Now there is the team of maybe you and a few people helping you with the nonprofit, the staff, those people who might be willing to help you with the campaign. So they might help you gather the assets, write the actual text that goes on the page, create the video, all those kinds of things. There's the team there, the internal in-house team, but there's also an outhouse team that you can actually make use of, and we call this a street team. So the street team is what you might think of as your core or your most committed donors. This is kind of familiar. If you've ever heard of peer-to-peer fundraising, peer-to-peer fundraising basically uses a street team in order to raise money on your behalf. But with GoFundMe, it's not the same thing as peer-to-peer fundraising. So what you want to do is you want to assemble in Excel, or just honestly taking a sheet of paper, a list of the top and most committed donors. And particularly, those individuals are not only giving money, they might also be volunteering at your regular events. So create a list. Obviously, you have your donor database, all the people who have given money in the past to your charity. Segment that and narrow that down to who are the most committed donors. So who are giving money regularly via your annual fundraising gala or your annual fundraisers, or giving large amounts of money. But then also, who are the people that are donating their time? They're volunteering regularly, they're showing up to your events, they're getting involved. Make a list of that, and you're going to label that your crowdfunding street team, because what you're going to do is you're going to ask for their help. You're going to ask for their help, and you're going to ask them to help spread the word about this upcoming crowdfunding GoFundMe charity fundraiser that you're going to be doing. And if possible, you want to get them in a room where this is going to be maybe an hour-long or 30-minute-long info session where you're going to be sharing, you're going to get them excited, maybe do some fun activities and stuff. But you also want to educate them about how crowdfunding works, how GoFundMe works, how they can help you when you actually hit that launch button and you're live on GoFundMe, what they need to do. Educate them about sharing this with their social media network, how their support, they're putting their money in immediately, is actually going to boost your funding meter and in that way create more credibility for your campaign. You're going to want to print out, if possible, a checklist of the things that you would like them to do when you go live on launch day. And if possible, make it as simple, make it as easy to understand, step by step, almost as though you're teaching someone who's in third grade about what they have to do. If you want them to post a message on their social media, write down already the message, a template, if you will. They can easily just post on their Facebook feed. If you want them to send direct messages via Instagram or via their Facebook, already write that out for them, hand that to them so they have a folder of all this information. And also for the emails, make sure you already draft that on their behalf. And you don't have to say, you don't have to use this, but this is just a suggested wording and probably most of them are going to be a little bit too lazy to come up with their own. So they might just use your template to help guide them and have that all laid out for them in a folder, step by step, what they should be doing, when they should be doing it. And that info session, not only is going to be used to educate them about crowdfunding, but also going to be used to hype them up, to get them excited. I've tried this many, many times. And I will tell you, people don't take action. They don't take action unless they are excited. So you got to get people, your street team and your internal team excited about this thing that you're doing. If you're kind of meek and you're like, well, I don't know if this is going to work or I don't know. We're going to try it. We'll see. There's a lot of uncertainty. You're not super sure. You're not super committed. No one else is going to be interested in helping you and no one else is going to want to join your team. But if you're excited, you're going to give it your all. You're committed. You're doing this thing, man. Other people are going to get excited and specifically for your vision. And this is the next point that I want to cover. Your vision is the most important part of a crowdfunding campaign and also the number one reason why people will give money. So let me kind of unpack that. Your vision is what I call the before and the after. The before and the after. This is really, you think of a story. A story tells what happened and how you got to this point in time. If you tell the story of founding your nonprofit, maybe you felt particularly belittled in your life because you're a minority. So you wanted to change things for the next generation. So you started this nonprofit and you're passionate for these reasons. You did this and this. You have all these milestones. That's your story. The vision is the inverse of your story. It's the opposite. It's the story that you want to tell 10 years down the road. The vision is the before and the after. What is happening now? What is the current reality? Are people undereducated? Are people suffering? Whatever your cause is, you want to paint a picture of the before and then you want to paint a picture of the after and how that is going to happen. And by giving money to this cause or to this event, you're making people believe that they are in a small way contributing to this transformation of the before and the after. So rather than having to have high illiteracy rates in schools, by giving money, you're going to donate a book to this child. You're going to donate 10 books to them, which is going to improve literacy rates. And that way in a year from now or two years from now, we're going to improve literacy by at least 15%. We're going to make it more tangible. The more tangible you can make it, the better. So we're going to have 100,000 new kids who have a much higher grade reading level. We've already tested this out on a very small group of classrooms and we've seen it go through the roof. We've had more kids testing with higher literacy scores. Show the before and after and do it as tangibly as possible. And this is not just with your video and your campaign text and these things, but when you're trying to get people excited in your street team and your internal team, talk about the before and after. Talk about the vision. What is the result? And the reason why this is important is that there have been so many studies done online. I talk about some of these in my book, Nonprofit Crowdfunding Explained. And one of the biggest reasons that millennials will give money is they feel like they can make an impact. They don't want to feel like I'm giving $10 to this faceless charity and it's going to help in some way. They want to tangibly have a sense of what that change is going to be that they're making with their hard-earned dollars. So they don't just want to help. They want to see change. Money in and of itself is not valuable. What's valuable is what you can do with the money. So paint a picture of your vision, the before and after. That's how you get your team excited. That's how you get strangers online excited. And that's how you're going to turn a stranger into a backer. And there are also some other ways to do that. So I'm going to cover one other kind of hack that is actually the reason why people or strangers give money to these online charities. If you've seen charities doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in online fundraising, I've had some of them on my podcast, you can actually see a lot of these elements in this ask. And of those that I've worked with, these are proven to work, these principles. And they've done studies on this. I have another video out there on YouTube talking about this. But in order to get people, strangers, to give money to your charitable GoFundMe campaign, you have to do two things. Number one, you have to create empathy. You have to create empathy, which I will say includes trust. So there is you, the charity, or the people working in the charity. There's the target demographic of people that you're trying to help, right? So the target demographic, people need to feel empathy with those individuals, they need to feel what these people are feeling. And typically, that's done with visual storytelling. So if you're watching a television commercial, and you see these dogs, these really cute dogs that are in a shelter, and they're like, they're starving to death, and they just look really sad. And it just makes you feel as a person watching that really bad and really guilty. And just like you feel for that animal. You see some other, you know, nonprofit commercials where there are kids that are starving in Africa, and they look horrible and emaciated. And you're like, that's just that's horrible. It makes me feel bad. That is empathy. You got to make people feel something for the target demographic. So the target demographic that you're helping is going through some issues, maybe frustrations related to their schooling or frustrations related to their access to education or whatever you're trying to help with, you want to make people feel what those individuals are feeling. And you do that with storytelling. The other is trust. So trust, we talked about credibility. That could be through your fundraising media, the accolades that you have the ways you've helped in the past, you want to show that you're actually a real nonprofit and that you're trustworthy in some way, that's going to make you much more likely and much more willing to give money. So you can talk about other ways you've helped in the past other milestones that you've hit, show a little bit of trust. This is the first thing that you need in order to get people's attention. And in order to get them to start to feel emotions about your actual campaign. And if you don't cause people to feel emotions, you're not going to get them to take action. And we talked about that a little bit before. The second thing is they need to feel distress. And by giving money, they help or alleviate that distress. So I'm running through this really quickly. But I have a lot of other content out there that talks about this more in depth. But basically, in order for someone to give money, not only do they need to feel empathy, they also have to feel a sense of distress, they have to feel uncomfortable, they have to feel like this is this is something wrong that's going on. If you're trying to save the environment, you learn about these koalas that are dying in brush fires. And you're like, that's wrong. This is not cool. Why is this going on? You start to feel frustration as the person who's watching that you're feeling a sense of distress because you empathize. And because of the situation, because of external factors, you're feeling this distress. And you feel this emotion and you want to do something with it. Like you want to help in some way you want to tell someone you want to shout to the world like, look at this, we have to we have to help this. And then you as a nonprofit, you offer a solution, which is you can help this, the way that you help is by giving money for this particular cause, and the money that you're giving has this particular impact. This is the formula for getting a stranger you don't know to actually give money to your GoFundMe campaign as a charity as a nonprofit, to get their attention, to get them to care about what you're doing to feel distress, and to want to help by giving money and by supporting it. And tangibly, they can see through your vision that before and after the way that they're, they're going to help. So it's kind of triggering two parts of tracking the emotional part of the brain, and then triggering the logical side of the brain. So people need a reason to give money because they want to explain to their friends later, I gave $20 to this campaign, you're not going to say because I felt distressed or because I felt empathy, you're not going to talk that way, you're going to give a logical reason. And that logical reason comes down to the before and after vision that you paint with your marketing and with your actual storytelling. So we covered some of this, the psychology behind getting people to donate. And this is really the most important part because if you don't do this, you're not going to get people to take action, you might get a lot of traffic on your page, but they're not going to actually support you, they're not going to care, or they're not going to feel emotions, and that doesn't matter then because people aren't going to support you. Let's talk a little bit about some of the strategies that you can use to share this campaign. So I'm just going to run through this really quickly. Number one is social media. So things like Instagram, doing Instagram stories, I have some videos on that, doing Instagram posts, using Facebook. You can also do other things like doing Facebook Live, etc. You can use Twitter. There are a lot of ways that you can use social media to share this campaign, to share your story, what it is you're doing, posting photos, posting videos, doing Instagram Lives, etc. So you can use Instagram and social media as one way to get traffic to this campaign, to get eyeballs on it, and that's just really free advertising, honestly. The other thing you can do is sort of old school, so letters, we'll say emails, live events. This is more of like the old school bread and butter ways to get attention, to get people to donate to a campaign, or to get people to care about an initiative, is by writing letters, emails, lives. This is basically all the same way, is to get traffic and attention to your campaign. A lot of the times, for some of these more old school methods, people might ask you, like, hey, can I just send you a check? Or can I just, you know, in some way do like, I don't know, come by the office and give you an envelope of money to donate to this campaign? You want to get people to actually support on the GoFundMe page, because that's really where you're going to see your fundraising meter going up and up. So there is a little bit of education about how GoFundMe works, and you're going to be doing that when you're following up with these people, and also doing things like using the phone to get on phone calls with your highest, your most regular giving donors, or people that are in your donor data. Now, the third part that I just want to cover is media, because we talked a little bit about the opportunity for media, and media could take a lot of forms. It could take the form of blogs, it could take the form of podcasts, it could take the form of influencers, et cetera. But media is another way that you can get eyeballs on your campaign page. This is a really badly drawn eyeball. You can get traffic on your campaign page, and in that way have the opportunity for people to sample your story. And this is a good step. Once you're, I'd say, about maybe five days into the campaign, you already have some funding, is to start to engage in this a little bit more. But media attention is another way, another three-prong strategy, the third prong for getting traffic and getting attention to your campaign page. And there's a ton of stuff that I can talk about when it comes to that. I think one of the coolest things about GoFundMe is that it's really available to everyone. You don't need to be super tech savvy to be able to use this. You don't need $10,000 or something to be able to do a massive campaign. It's really easy, and you can get started even for a smaller campaign doing a $2,000 raise just to see how it works. So it's a very powerful medium, and a lot of the times I see people doing multiple crowdfunding campaigns. It's a great way to tell your story. Also, there are no platform fees on the onus of the nonprofit. People are asked to give money at the end of their donation process if they want to help support the operations of GoFundMe. So it's a really easy way. It's a really great way for you to use and harness the power of social media and the internet in order to attract more people to what it is that you're trying to do. I hope you enjoyed this video, and if you did, not only give me a thumbs up, but also pick up a copy of Nonprofit Crowdfunding Explained, which is available on Amazon as a paperback version, also available on Audible. A lot of great stuff. You can leave a comment down below if you have any questions. Also, I've got some other videos out there on YouTube that go more in-depth into this. So I hope that you enjoyed this video. My name is Salvador Brinkman, and I will see you next time.